According to conventional Web-based architectures, a client application (e.g., a Web browser) requests information from a Web server, the Web server retrieves the information from a database system (e.g., via an intermediate application server), and the Web server provides the information to the client application.
Open Data Protocol (OData) is a resource-based Web protocol for querying and updating data. Accordingly, a Web-based client may use the OData protocol to retrieve data stored in a database system, as long as the database system (and/or an intermediate application server) supports the OData protocol. However, the OData protocol does not provide an efficient mechanism for accessing single entities of a parameterized entity set.